The Effect of Tracking Students by Ability into Different Schools: A Natural Experiment (original) (raw)
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The Effect of Tracking Students by Ability into Different Schools: a Natural Experiment 1
2011
The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of any further increase in its size. This paper presents a natural experiment where the increase in the size of the elite track was followed by a significant improvement in average educational outcomes. This experiment provides a rare opportunity to isolate the overall effect of allowing entry to the elite track for a group that was previously only at the margin of being admitted. JEL Keywords: education; tracking; selection; JEL Classification: I2. 1
The desegregating effect of school tracking
Journal of Urban Economics, 2014
This paper makes the following point: "detracking" schools, that is preventing them from allocating students to classes according to their ability, may lead to an increase in income residential segregation. It does so in a simple model where households care about the school peer group of their children. If ability and income are positively correlated, tracking implies that some high income households face the choice of either living in the areas where most of the other high income households live and having their child assigned to the low track, or instead living in lower income neighbourhoods where their child would be in the high track. Under mild conditions, tracking leads to an equilibrium with partial income desegregation where perfect income segregation would be the only stable outcome without tracking.
On the efficiency costs of de-tracking secondary schools in Europe
Education Economics, 2012
During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the e¢ ciency costs, if any, of de-tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills-two jobs model with a frictional labour market, where new school graduates need to actively search for their best match. We compute optimal tracking length and the output gain/loss associated to the gap between actual and optimal tracking length. Using a sample of 18 countries, we …nd that: a) actual tracking length is often longer than optimal, which might call for some e¢ cient de-tracking; b) the output loss of having a tracking length longer or shorter than optimal is sizeable, and close to 2 percent of total net output.
In Search of Value Added in the Case of Complex School Effects
2013
In traditional studies on value-added indicators of educational effectiveness, students are usually treated as belonging to those schools where they took their final examination. However, in practice, students sometimes attend multiple schools and therefore it is questionable whether this assumption of belonging to the last school they attended can be made. Furthermore, the schools attended earlier by students might have long-term effects on their subsequent performance. Using data from Dutch primary and secondary schools, multiple membership models and cross classification multilevel models were estimated to explore the effects of student mobility and long-term primary school effects on the estimated value added of secondary schools. Long-term effects of primary schools did not change the estimated value added of secondary schools. On the other hand, allowing students to be a member of multiple secondary schools changed the estimated effectiveness of these schools especially for schools in the middle range of effectiveness.
School tracking, social segregation and educational opportunity: evidence from Belgium
Working Papers of Faculty of …, 2010
Educational tracking is a very controversial issue in education. The tracking debate is about the virtues of uniformity and vertical differentiation in the curriculum and teaching. The pro-tracking group claims that curriculum and teaching better aimed at children's varied interest and skills will foster learning efficacy. The anti-tracking group claims that tracking systems are inefficient and unfair because they hinder learning and distribute learning inequitably. In this paper we provide a detailed within-country analysis of a specific educational system with a long history of early educational tracking between schools, namely the Flemish secondary school system in Belgium. This is interesting place to look because it provides a remarkable mix of excellence and inequality. Indeed the Flemish school system is repeatedly one of the best performer in the international harmonized PISA tests in math, science and reading; whereas it produces some of the most unequal distributions of learning between schools and students. Combining evidence from the PISA 2006 data set at the student and school level with recent statistical methods, we show first the dramatic impact of tracking on social segregation; and then, the impact of social segregation on equality of educational opportunity (adequately measured). It is shown that tracking, via social segregation, has a major effect on inequality of opportunity. Children of different economic classes will have different access to knowledge.
Journal of Human Resources, 2011
We use administrative data from the lottery-based open enrollment system in Beijing middle schools to obtain unbiased estimates of school fixed effects on student performance. To do this, we classify children in selection channels, with each channel representing a unique succession of lotteries through which a child was assigned to a school, given his parents' choice of schools and the schools' enrollment quotas. Within each channel, students had an equal probability of being assigned to a given school. Results show that school fixed effects are strong determinants of student performance. These fixed effects are shown to be highly correlated with teacher qualifications measured in particular by their official ranks. Furthermore, teacher qualifications have about the same predictive power for student test scores as do school fixed effects, implying that observable aspects of school quality almost fully account for the role of school quality differences.
Peer Heterogeneity, School Tracking and Students’ Performances: Evidence from PISA 2006
2011
The empirical literature using large international students' assessments tends to neglect the role of school composition variables in order not to incur in a misidentification of peer effects. However, this could lead to an error of higher logical type since the learning environment crucially depends on peer variables. In this paper, using PISA 2006, we show how peer heterogeneity is a key determinant of students' attainments. Interestingly, the effect of peer variables differs depending on the country tracking policy: peer heterogeneity reduces efficiency in comprehensive systems whereas it has a non-linear impact in early-tracking ones. In turn, linear peer effects are larger in early-tracking systems. Results remain robust in both student-and school-level regressions and when we add school-level dummies and several controls correlated with the school choice to alleviate the selectivity bias. JEL: I21, I28, J24